Looks cool btw. :+
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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
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Ok, so I made versions for Linux and Mac of my latest prototype and I'm getting different results: some people got it working with no problems and others can't even start the game.
Seeing some of the crash reports I'm starting to think that the real problem is not the platforms but the different GPU, in the last version I changed all the ships to Physical Based Shaders (because they look much better that way) but I didn't stop to think that maybe PBR is not supported by many GPU since it seems to be a pretty recent trend...
Ugh, I don't want to sacrifice it though, what do I do?
DX9 GPU's should support PBR since it is just a shader.
Doesn't need a specific shader model or something?
Not saying it couldn't be something with the shader. Just that PBR shaders do support DX9. Marmoset's PBR shader in Unity works with DX9.
Thanks for the info, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself and is something else the root of the problem.
I'll ask the creators of the shaders, I hope they are still supporting it, everyone is hyped about using Unity 5 but I don't want to make the upgrade in the middle of the development.
Branching out from my AAA dayjob and starting some Unity stuff with my coworker. I'll be working mostly in Playmaker to script and create prefab elements.
Anyone here who has used Playmaker that does not like using it?
Is it powerful enough to do player movement and handle all player inputs?
Hoping that a good handful of stuff can be done in Playmaker as I don't know C# very well yet.
Wanted to quickly comment on this with a personal experience from last year. I was at a student game showcase, where awards were handed out. When it came time for the awards to be presented, there was a lot of hushed chatter amongst the crowd (of students trying to get jobs at the studio where I work and the others studios in attendence), where I was standing, that, "Game X was shit compared to ours, whatever," and, "Wow, fuck Game Y it didn't deserve to win compared to Game B."
Don't let any of this get to you, or at least try not to. There are tonnes of people who will think your game doesn't deserve ____ award, and even a few that will have a gaping void of social awareness and etiquette that will enable them to say it to your face. What does it matter? You won the award. Let them be upset and immature. They probably won't go far with a shitty attitude like that.
Anyone here who has used Playmaker that does not like using it?
Is it powerful enough to do player movement and handle all player inputs?
Hoping that a good handful of stuff can be done in Playmaker as I don't know C# very well yet.
Wanted to quickly comment on this with a personal experience from last year. I was at a student game showcase, where awards were handed out. When it came time for the awards to be presented, there was a lot of hushed chatter amongst the crowd (of students trying to get jobs at the studio where I work and the others studios in attendence), where I was standing, that, "Game X was shit compared to ours, whatever," and, "Wow, fuck Game Y it didn't deserve to win compared to Game B."
Don't let any of this get to you, or at least try not to. There are tonnes of people who will think your game doesn't deserve ____ award, and even a few that will have a gaping void of social awareness and etiquette that will enable them to say it to your face. What does it matter? You won the award. Let them be upset and immature. They probably won't go far with a shitty attitude like that.
diving into unity with a udemy course...
can you survive the keyboard cave?! gimmicky 2 minute game, with a possible buggy third room
http://gamebucket.io/game/d9ff2385-245c-42ef-a56e-5911a7491ed8
can you survive the keyboard cave?! gimmicky 2 minute game, with a possible buggy third room
http://gamebucket.io/game/d9ff2385-245c-42ef-a56e-5911a7491ed8
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
BlastProcessing
Member
BlastProcessing is a legit person and I think ya'll should know that. SXSW was a really interesting experience even if they did get my games name wrong at the awards ceremony
The main thing I learned on at this expo is that my game has pretty good main stream appeal, especially with kids, but I don't think there's any great way to reach that audience and the game is just a little bit too hard for most of them (the kids that is). Kinda wondering if a child friendly mode with no fail state would be a good or bad thing... Hmm, the problem is many players fail once or twice before really getting the game and I wouldn't want to encourage them to not get the best experience.
It was great chatting with you.
As far as difficulty goes. It think that a showfloor environment makes people antsy, less attentive, and more prone to frustration, so I wouldn't draw too many hard conclusions from player reactions at SXSW.
Of course your game has appeal with kids. It is like a Saturday Morning cartoon that vomits a million particle effects directly on your retinas. I think that will motivate kids to play through the failure. I know that when I was a kid, I would become obsessed with mastering a game. If we could beat Megaman 2 in our day, than kids today will be fine.
You already know this, but good design isn't always about giving people exactly what they want.
Thanks for the perspective. It bothered me more than it should because I was exhausted at the time. I am (mostly) over it now.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Just hoping for some general feedback about the following pic, does it look like a decent representation of a retro arcade game? The idea is that the player in my main game will be able to click this game machine which initiates the mini game space shmup.
And here's some footage of the mini-game itself if anyone's interested: Mini-Game
Curious about this myself, the only resource I've been using is this thread but I'd love to see what else is out there.
And here's some footage of the mini-game itself if anyone's interested: Mini-Game
Curious about this myself, the only resource I've been using is this thread but I'd love to see what else is out there.
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
Sometimes I look at code I wrote only like a week or so earlier and think, 'holy shit that is genius' I have no memory of writing it.
electroflame
Member
I love having moments like that, although, to be fair, I often have moments on the other end of the spectrum: i.e. "Holy crap, why am I such an idiot" moments.
Or, possibly worse, when I have well commented code that I know that I wrote but I have no idea why I wrote it that way, even though my comments try to explain things back to me like I'm a preschooler learning my ABCs.
Still, everything's worth it for those few moments where my past self ends up accidentally impressing my present/future self.
I don't recommend trying to skip C# scripting in Unity, Unity isn't built for that. Learning a sufficient amount of scripting isn't hard. My students have gotten the knack of it in about two weeks. If you want to do all visual scripting, maybe go with UE4 and Blueprints.
Playmaker is best used for speeding up prototyping; one of my friends who runs his own small game company says it lets him do in a day something that would otherwise take two or three. But if a project went forward he will rip Playmaker stuff out and replace it with solid code.
I'm still working on linking things up, but I'm finally getting the status bar GUI closer to a usable state. The art and text in the status bar is placeholder though.
I'm also getting used to this new font. I don't think it's TOO horrible even though I made it from scratch. The lines are a bit close together in this case but that's sort of the nature of using this font size with room for 4 lines, locking everything to a 2x2 pixel grid.
hobblygobbly
Member
I have similar experiences. Just recently I wrote code about a month ago regarding procedural generation, I wrote it in a way at the time that allowed it to keep track of data pertaining to the procedural system fairly well - I didn't think at the time "I might need to access this data" - it never crossed my mind, it just naturally formed through some of my modularity to be easily accessible. Fast forward to this week and I'm needing particular data from this procedural system to expand another procedural system on top of it and I think "ugh fuck, I probably need to write some shit to store/access this". So I go and look at the procedural system and realise well fuck, all the data I need already is easily available for access due to the way I wrote it.
It feels good when code you've written comes out naturally as adaptable/scalable with ease later on the line.
Although sometimes bad things happen where I've written code a month or so prior and didn't comment any of it (bad, I know - sometimes it happens when I'm kind of in a "flurry"), and then the time comes where I go back and look at it and I don't understand what the shit I wrote, I couldn't understand my own code because it was devoid of comments/documentation. Earlier this year this happened to me, I spent about 2-3 hours trying to understand something I wrote myself. The code itself involved a lot of linear algebra which was the main cause, lol.
Mystic River
Member
and sometimes the next week you find yourself looking at some code and think, what was I thinking about! this code is so bad that I can't even understand it!... or rewrote the same thing twice, or three times? and a few times as you said, wow I was a genious! and I didn't know it
A few weeks ago, I was tempted to ask for help and get someone to explain me some code I wrote that was working well but I didn't know why it was working so well and why
i was getting good results, so at the end I decipher it and was very happy that it was written in a very smart way to optimize the whole process... saddly it was complicated but saved a lot of time.
Thanks for the input! I will start brushing up on C# in parallel then.
Awesome, congrats!
Still don't actully own Wii U, but I should be picking it up soon and you can count me to get the game
Mr. Luchador
Member
I'm struggling with Pixel Art, but I feel I'm trying too hard to be like other people's styles and not trying to create my 'own'. So maybe I'll just mess about freely and see what happens.
You're definitely on the right path. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but Innovation is even greater still.
Decided to play around with unity a while ago and yesterday I wanted to see how easy it was to export to android. I built the apk for the sample assets project(has the car and planes demo, fps/tps/ball demo, particles, and 2d demo. When I run it though only the the car and plan demo works correctly. The 2d demo's ui glitches out to nearly outside the screen so you can only move to the right. In the tps/fps/ball demo you move at a 45 degree angle when you're trying to go straight. Was wondering if this is a general issue of if theres something on my end that messed it up. I tried running it on both my galaxy note 4 as well as my nexus 7 with lollipop and both had the same issues.
liliththepale
Banned
I'm in love with our new armor concepts.
Hey, those are great!
show me your skeleton
Member
getting some nice final fantasy tactics vibes from those, awesome!
Jacksinthe
Banned
If the UI was built with GUI you may have issues depending on screen size. Its why I always build my own GUI and place them by pixel coordinates based on screen size vs standard GUI placement.
As for the 45 degree angle I don't know. There's a lot of controller info I'd need to see to find out what is the funk.
Jacksinthe
Banned
I'll have to give it a look. I haven't used their UI, only tried it around 4.0ish and didn't like it ha! I'll give it a shot eventually but building my own for my needs works for me for now.
SeanNoonan
Member
Do you know what game you want to make or are you literally just creating art? If you know what game you're building, create assets that serve the game at their "atomic level", then flesh them out. My tips would be use the smallest amount of pixels and colours that you can in order to convey your intentions.
Of course if you're just building art for art sake, I cannot help you
hobblygobbly
Member
Okay so I've found myself in a situation with audio that I haven't really before.
Say you have a ship, it fires cannons. There's a time where X amount of cannons fire the exact same time and both use the same audio clip. The problem is that because there's no latency between the clips playing, they're all played at the same time and thus amplify the overall volume because all the clips are played at the same time so it sounds like just one audio clip is playing for it but just louder.
This is expected, but not what I want. I can solve it by varying the volume/pitch of each clip randomly just slightly which pretty much solves it. Another approach I guess is delaying the sounds randomly by some amount and then checking "has this played in the last 200ms?, if so, don't play), so you'd still get sounds coming through but not as amplified but I don't think it's that elegant of a solution. The problem with this is that then there's still amplification but at different levels depending on how many passed the check.
It's only a "problem" because the sounds are the same and synchronised when played, I guess adding actual variations to the audio clip itself can help too.
Think in terms of a spaceship game where a ship might have 6 hard points on it all firing cannons at the same time, the cannon noise from each is played in sync as a result and thus amplified. My question is (although I've kind of solved the problem from what I mentioned above) is what other techniques can one go about this?
Say you have a ship, it fires cannons. There's a time where X amount of cannons fire the exact same time and both use the same audio clip. The problem is that because there's no latency between the clips playing, they're all played at the same time and thus amplify the overall volume because all the clips are played at the same time so it sounds like just one audio clip is playing for it but just louder.
This is expected, but not what I want. I can solve it by varying the volume/pitch of each clip randomly just slightly which pretty much solves it. Another approach I guess is delaying the sounds randomly by some amount and then checking "has this played in the last 200ms?, if so, don't play), so you'd still get sounds coming through but not as amplified but I don't think it's that elegant of a solution. The problem with this is that then there's still amplification but at different levels depending on how many passed the check.
It's only a "problem" because the sounds are the same and synchronised when played, I guess adding actual variations to the audio clip itself can help too.
Think in terms of a spaceship game where a ship might have 6 hard points on it all firing cannons at the same time, the cannon noise from each is played in sync as a result and thus amplified. My question is (although I've kind of solved the problem from what I mentioned above) is what other techniques can one go about this?
Pretty awesome. If you're not concerned with realistic body proportions, you could easily get away with smart (re)use and apply one mesh to both gendered characters, as is shown in the concept art.
I've worked with audio designers in the past, and their solutions for this type of problem vary. One really smart one that I liked, was that you don't really need to focus on the amount of things emitting sound, but instead convey the fact that lots of sounds are being emitted. In this way, you could have 6+ cannons firing, but your brain only has the capacity to separate so many sounds at the same time, after a certain threshold they all meld together. So maybe you only use 1/2 the emitters for the amount of point sources you're using, you could get away with it, especially if you include some slight variations, as you've mentioned. This still conveys to the player that there's a tonne of weaponry firing at the same time. If you include variation and reserve certain frequencies (such as low bass freqs) for stressing certain things, that can magnify the feel you're trying to convey. 6 guns using 2 mid freq sounds, each being unique to another, and 1 low bass freq booming sound can really get across the feeling you're unloading lots of rounds at once!
In a game I worked on, multiple enemies could be firing AK-47s, but I think our audio designers capped the simultaneous weapons firing at a certain number. So, perhaps 3 guns, even if it was 6 or 7 guys shooting at the same time. They added variation, so it might sound like 3 different guns (1 M4A1, 1 AK47, 1 M16, for example), but this helped the players situate and differentiate the point sources' physical locations and it meant that the overlap wasn't bad since it was 3 different sounds rather than the same sound 3 times.
Hope this helps!
James Coote
Neo Member
Nice! I like animated menu background stuff like that. Just makes the game feel that little bit more alive (in a different way than the whole juice-it-or-lose-it stuff). Had great fun implementing them in my own game. Our artist had also made some night-time assets for the game, so made the game switch to night-time-scenery after 9pm:
hobblygobbly
Member
Thanks - it does help, I've been researching and asking others as well and accumulating a lot of approaches to this situation that is helping me better find my own solution/adaptation to suit the project. Dealing with audio on the programming side of things is a newish experience for me and I'm learning sound design along with it. I'm going to experiment a lot regarding this.
ClivePwned
Member
longtime lurker, long-time audio designer and Unity/Game Designer newbie here-
pitch variation and audio file variants can help.
Is the game 3D or 2D? If 3D, you can play around with the range/volume falloff of the sound so that the volume attenuate the further away the listener is.
You can try throttling the sounds so only a set number of the same sound can play- you might set it so that each new weapon blast has priority. Listen to a lot of older war and scifi movies and you will hear this done a lot.
The temptation is to add sounds to absolutely everything in the game- which will then sound terrible. So much of successful sound design and mixing is about reducing volumes of non essential sounds.
The other thing is EQ ing sounds the same way you would EQ instruments in music (ie removing bass frequencies from your lead guitar so you can hear the bass guitar and drums more clearly).
Lastly, when you're really advanced, you would use a dynamics processor like a limiter to make sure your volume doesn't go nuts when things get chaotic. You set a volume threshold and when you audio hits it, the volume level is reduced by a set amount. This is done to the actual audio output. Do it well and it sounds like Halo 3. Do it badly and it sounds like Halo 4.
Put together a Twitter page for the indie game I'm working on right now
https://twitter.com/CUZEgame
we don't really have a website or dev-blog since we only spent about a month developing it and we are pretty close to finishing it
https://twitter.com/CUZEgame
we don't really have a website or dev-blog since we only spent about a month developing it and we are pretty close to finishing it
Dynamite Shikoku
Congratulations, you really deserve it!
Anyone know any good publishers or publishers with good reps for mobile games?
Candescence
Member
If you mean you tried it before 4.6, then you're missing out, because Unity got an entirely new, vastly better WYSIWYG-esque UI system that's scalable, flexible and actually usable compared to the old one, and isn't just 2D stuff, either. It's basically Scaleform without having to bother with Flash and an in-built event system for switching between menu options and what buttons do and whatnot.
BlastProcessing
Member
Mega congrats!
When I finished my last game I just sat around for a day or two with no idea what to do with myself.
hobblygobbly
Member
Thanks - it is 3D indeed. I have been learning a lot in the audio side of things lately and suggestions I've received from a couple of people have been things I hadn't thought about. Fun experience at the moment experimenting with this side of things.
I've always appreciated sound design in anything, videogame, movie, etc - very good design is incredibly atmospheric and immersive for me but never understood the processes, now I'm learning.
So, I'm having mini-panic attacks over my game as of late. When I started it, it was for the RPG Maker contest, and evolved into something else entirely. Now, almost a year later, the game is finally coming together, and I can't help but feel like it (or maybe I) am not good enough. Like no matter how polished it is, I have this thought peeling in the back of my brain that "you can't polish a turd," and it's stressing me out. It goes away after every play test, when people don't rip into it, but so far it's only been close friends testing.
Is this a normal feeling? If so, does it ever go away? Anyone had something similar to this?
Is this a normal feeling? If so, does it ever go away? Anyone had something similar to this?
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